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Loading... Through the eye of a needle wealth, the fall of Rome, and the making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (edition 2014)by Peter Brown
Work InformationThrough the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD by Peter Brown
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. This is a thorough and enlightening study of the development of the Western Church from the Fourth through the Sixth centuries seen through the filter of how it dealt with the rich and with the idea of wealth in general. The major focus is on Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome, but a great deal of attention is also given to more of the "background", especially in Gaul and Spain. This is both readable and informative and deserves to become a standard resource on the period. This learned and well-written book totally transformed my understanding of both the later Roman Empire and the early centuries of Christianity. To take one example, I knew Carthage was an important city, but I had no idea how important; it was essentially the Rome of North Africa, its hinterland was the source of Rome's grain supply after the grain of Egypt started going to Constantinople, and its loss to the Vandals was one of the biggest blows to the Empire in its slow collapse. As for the church, Brown brings to life personalities like Augustine, Jerome, and Pelagius and shows how their ideas interacted with the people and culture around them and with the situation of the Empire at the time. Anyone with even a slight interest in the period and topic should read it. Working with what seems like a fairly prosaic theme, Peter Brown has written a tremendous history that suggests that the relationship of the Church in late antiquity to wealth and the wealthy is a key driver of the establishment of Christianity in the West. By quoting extensively from major intellectual figures of the day such as Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and others, creates a picture of a society whose ideas have as rich a subtlety and complexity as those of any age. I constantly found myself turning the footnotes to ask myself, "how could he know that?" Brown is always aware that he is dealing with writers who lived, not with dry texts. As he says of one of his sources, "Salvian was a vivid person with his own, idiosyncratic take on the problems of his day." It is this ability to get at the person behind the text, however dimly observed, that makes Brown's book so compelling. This is not the Christianity of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, which paints a picture of religious intolerance, but rather a religion whose complex relationship with wealth positioned it to survive the economic collapse of the Empire. This is the kind of massive, authoritative tome that could only be produced after decades of intensive study. In Through the Eye of a Needle, Peter Brown looks at wealth and Christianity in the late Empire of the Latin West. He tracks how the collapse of centralised state authority, accompanied by a gradual fading of the idea of the populus Romanus as a living entity, allowed the Church to evolve into an institution built on corporate wealth. Wealth was given a higher purpose—not used simply to pay for bread and circuses, for entertainment in gilded buildings, it was now used to construct churches and monasteries full of light. At several hundred pages, this will not be the book for anyone without a pre-existing interest in the history of wealth, patronage, or the development of the early Christian Church. While Brown writes fluidly and lucidly as always, this is densely written and very detailed, perhaps at times overly so. Still, this is a wonderful attempt at a recreation of a mindset at once very familiar and very alien, and I found it well worth the investment of time.
Jesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Through the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual and social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire, written by the world's foremost scholar of late antiquity. Peter Brown examines the rise of the church through the lens of money and the challenges it posed to an institution that espoused the virtue of poverty and called avarice the root of all evil. Drawing on the writings of major Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome, Brown examines the controversies and changing attitudes toward money caused by the influx of new wealth into church coffers, and describes the spectacular acts of divestment by rich donors and their growing influence in an empire beset with crisis. He shows how the use of wealth for the care of the poor competed with older forms of philanthropy deeply rooted in the Roman world, and sheds light on the ordinary people who gave away their money in hopes of treasure in heaven. Through the Eye of a Needle challenges the widely held notion that Christianity's growing wealth sapped Rome of its ability to resist the barbarian invasions, and offers a fresh perspective on the social history of the church in late antiquity. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)270.2Religions History, geographic treatment, biography of Christianity History of Christianity Period of ecumenic councils; Centralization (325-787)LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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But holy hell is this book too long. ( )